A Search, Maddening and Infectious
["The Witch Diggers"] is a good, long, warm, generous and curious novel. Its detail rounded and rich, an enormous number of vigorous characters abounding, it is a physical panorama concerned morally with man's infatuation with plans and calculations, from the noblest of them to the maddest and most useless and hopeless, and how this infatuation distorts, ruthlessly opposes, and even dooms his powers of love….
The title refers specifically to a brother and sister, inmates of the Poor Farm, who believe that the truth is something as actual and literal as a piece of paper, actually and literally buried in the ground somewhere, to be unearthed by diggers if they dig long enough, then to set mankind free. A curious splendor is in these witch diggers, maddening and infectious.
This novel about love, responsibility, fate, is presented in a physical world of earthly beauty and ugliness, of vigor, fecundity, and general stir….
The characters are alive and vividly struggling, explained fully and yet remaining, I thought, opaque to a degree, as real-life people do, but this gains them a curious wholeness in the context….
Placed in the uncontroversial times, in the simple setting, within the order only of the seasons, the novel is left free for its characters to move under their own stars. Some of these—the Poor Farm immates—have been relieved even further of worldly impedimenta; and these are the characters who run to the greatest extreme of all in variety of personality and in action—from the catatonic to the frenzied. Stripped to the utterly physical, the physical of the Poor House pigs at times, the book reaches here its moral bone—which is Miss West's triumph….
[Link Conboy,] a man of scruples and conscience and nobility, is essentially inarticulate—he who had the best chance not to be. And this is the key, I think: so is every other character in the book inarticulate, from whence stems his fate and his disaster…. [Nobody] is able to communicate at all, except when it is possible through sexual behavior or strangely ritual symbolic action, as the witch diggers do.
If "The Witch Diggers" is a novel of the distinction it is because in dealing with the passions, Miss West is dealing also with passion itself. Charades is a favorite game in this Indiana locality. In a sense all the action in the novel is a charade, the characters moving on the scene in sides or teams or alone, to present their allotted syllable the best they can.
Eudora Welty, "A Search, Maddening and Infectious," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1951 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), January 14, 1951, p. 5.
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